Influenced by the pious Italian Catholic, Giambattista Vico, Gentile in his philosophy of Actual Idealism or Actualism (Attualismo) attempts to preserve Christian heritage. Palmieri’s work outlining Fascist Philosophy absorbs Vico’s philosophy and his “Ages” as a bridge between Catholic social teaching and Italian historical philosophy on the place of the Roman Catholic Church in Italy to form this idea of the Organic State, or CORPORATIVISMO. Fascism sought to position itself as the modern realization of an “eternal” Italian-Catholic spirit against modernity’s ills, where Fascism recognizes the authority of the Church, but subordinates the Church to the totalitarian ethical State.
- FIRST SECTION: VICO’S CYCLES OF HISTORY AND EARLY PROCESS THEOLOGY
- SECOND SECTION: GENTILE’S RADICAL HUMANISM
ACTUALISM AND CATHOLICISM
Speaking more on the readings, or interpretations of these Italian thinkers on Vico like Gentile, is that Gentile’s interpretation of Vichean concepts is not a direct copy, but a radicalization of Vico’s ideas and theories. The verum-factum principle (we truly know only what we make/create) is at the core of Gentile’s Actual Idealism, in which reality is not static but the pure act of thinking (spirit), where subject and object unite in the ongoing creative process. Gentile, like Vico, rejected abstract rationalism in favor of concrete historical becoming and “poetic” (imaginative) origins of civil society.
The radicalization comes in, because he turns Vico’s providential history and human making into an absolute immanentism where the State embodies the ethical will of the Spirit.
Gentile was not a pious traditionalist. His philosophy is immanentist and pantheistic-leaning, identifying Spirit with the State’s creative act rather than a transcendent personal God. However, he and Fascism explicitly positioned Actual Idealism as compatible with and supportive of Catholicism to “preserve” Italy’s Christian heritage just like Vico. Gentile helped engineer the 1929 Lateran Pacts (Concordat), which reconciled the Italian state with the Church after decades of Risorgimento tensions. For the Fascists, Vico supplies the anti-individualist, providential, cyclical-historical justification and Catholic tradition supplies the moral religious sanction and Italy-specific legitimacy.
What we have learned from all our readings on Gentile, is that in practice, Actual Idealism framed the Fascist State as an “ethical State” that fulfills religious and moral needs. The individual is meant to find spiritual realization by merging with the higher collective will (Nation or State), and for Catholics, this includes living under Church discipline. Palmieri specifically addresses Italians on this philosophy, that the Fascist State must recognize the authority of the Church. Fascism presented itself as the fulfillment of Italy’s Catholic-national tradition (against liberal individualism and materialism), while subordinating the Church to the totalitarian State. While, some saw it as subordinating or distorting Christianity, the intent to preserve and integrate the heritage within Fascist ideology is integral to the process in the development of Fascist philosophy.
GENTILE’S HUMANISM OF THE SPIRIT
Gentile’s “humanism” was never a straightforward revival of Renaissance humanism, but a radical transformation of it. Gentile explicitly called his Actual Idealism (or attualismo) a humanism — an immanentist, anti-solipsistic humanism in which reality exists only in the pure act of human thinking or spirit, and the individual finds true humanity only by merging with the ethical State. He is personally having a dialogue with the works of Renaissance thinkers in his Studies on the Renaissance (1923), The Concept of Man in the Renaissance (1916), Giordano Bruno and the Thought of the Renaissance (1920), etc., but he rejected the individualistic core of Renaissance humanism (the autonomous, self-fashioning person celebrated by Petrarch, Pico, or Burckhardt).
For Gentile, that individualism had produced the decadence of liberal modernity. Fascism would complete the Italian spiritual tradition by subordinating the person to the collective “act” of the nation-State. So, he imports the spirit and classical learning of the Renaissance into Fascism only after stripping out its individualistic, liberal-humanist element and replacing it with a totalitarian, state-centric “humanism of the spirit” (sometimes later called the “humanism of labor” in his final works).
TRAJECTORY OF GENTILIAN INFLUENCE IN FASCIST SPIRITUAL IDEAS
In the early peak of Gentile’s influence in Fascism (1922-1929), his humanism is central. Gentile’s reform of education (1923) becomes the first major Fascist law emphasizing classical humanistic schooling (Latin, philosophy, idealism) to forge a new elite conscious of its spiritual unity with the State.
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The Doctrine of Fascism (1932, largely Gentile’s text) and his 1925 Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals present Fascism as the realization of a higher Italian humanism rooted in Risorgimento idealism (Mazzini, Vico) and Renaissance spirit, but explicitly anti-individualist.
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Palmieri’s 1936 Philosophy of Fascism still fully reflects this phase where Vico and Gentilian thought is the challenge to Renaissance-style individualism and the birth of Fascist spiritual unity.
THREE STAGE DECLINE OF GENTILE’S MARGINALIZED INFLUENCE IN FASCISM
First marginalization (late 1920s to mid-1930s): Gentile’s personal political influence declined sharply after the 1929 Lateran Pacts. His strong anti-clericalism clashed with Mussolini’s pragmatic alliance with the Church. He lost key posts (though he kept cultural ones like editor of the Enciclopedia Italiana). The regime increasingly favored more pragmatic, squadrist, or corporatist figures over pure philosophers.
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Decisive rupture: the 1938 Racial Laws (the real “removal” of Gentile’s spiritual humanism)
This is the turning point. Gentile’s humanism was spiritual and cultural, not biological. The nation was an ethical/spiritual reality realized in the act of thinking and willing together; Jews who identified with Italy were Italians. He privately helped Jewish colleagues and intellectuals after 1938 and never publicly endorsed biological racism. The Nazi-inspired “Manifesto of Race” (July 1938) introduced materialist, pseudo-scientific antisemitism and Aryanism — exactly the kind of external, deterministic doctrine Gentile’s actual idealism rejected. Many early Fascists (Italo Balbo, Dino Grandi, etc.) also opposed it, but Mussolini pushed it for the Axis alliance. From this moment, the regime’s public ideology shifted away from Gentile’s immanentist “humanism of the spirit” toward a more biological, hierarchical, and externally imposed racism. Gentile remained loyal (he never broke with Mussolini), but his philosophical version of Fascism was no longer the guiding doctrine in policy or propaganda.
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Final phase (1943-1945, Italian Social Republic/RSI): In the Nazi-puppet Salò Republic, Fascism became more radically “social” (nationalization, socialization of industry) and militantly totalitarian under German pressure. Gentile accepted the presidency of the Academy of Italy and still defended the regime philosophically, but he privately criticized the renewed antisemitic measures. The regime’s daily reality was now survival, war mobilization, and collaboration — not Gentilean idealism or Renaissance-inspired spiritual education. He was assassinated by communist partisans in Florence on 15 April 1944; with him died the last major living embodiment of the philosophical, humanistic phase of Fascism.
FINAL PHASE OF GENTILE’S INFLUENCE
Renaissance humanism’s individualistic core was already rejected by Gentile in the 1920s and replaced by state-spiritual “humanism.” Gentile’s own spiritual humanism becomes dominant in his thinking in the 1920s and is culturally influential into the mid-1930s. Attualismo underwent its final phase of marginalization and abandonment after 1938 due to the adoption of biological racism and the necessities of the Nazi alliance and total war. The regime kept the rhetoric of the “new man,” the ethical State, and Italian spiritual superiority, but the living philosophical content (Gentile’s actual idealism rooted in his Renaissance studies) was sidelined in favor of more materialist, racial, and pragmatic authoritarianism.
Fascism never officially repudiated Gentile, since Mussolini continued to call him the “philosopher of Fascism,” but in practice the regime moved beyond his version once it needed Nazi alignment and wartime radicalization. So, the “humanistic” element, which convinced many thinkers into its early faction and that survived was only the emptied slogan — a collectivist, anti-liberal shell stripped of Gentile’s deeper idealist metaphysics. This is why later scholars (and Palmieri in 1936) could still present Vico and Gentile as the true origin, while post-1938 Fascist practice looked quite different.
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